Yahoo! Australia & NZ will partner with the National Library of Australia to create a publicly accessible bank of digital images featuring contemporary photographs of urban and rural Australia.

Flickr (www.flickr.com), a photograph sharing website owned by Yahoo!, contains more than 70 million stored images by photographers from all over the world of which approximately 80% can be freely accessed by visitors to the site. Every four seconds a new image is added by the site’s two million users.

PictureAustralia (www.pictureaustralia.org), managed by the National Library, is a bank of more than one million images set up by the National Library as a community resource. Primarily historical in nature, these images come from the collections of 42 national and international institutions including museums, libraries, galleries and other archives.

The two organisations are calling on Australians to add their photos to two new sections or ‘groups’ on Flickr. The first, entitled PictureAustralia: Australia Day encourages people to show how they celebrate our national day. The second, called PictureAustralia: People, Places and Events, is being set up as a repository for more general images illustrating the look, feel and spirit of Australia and its people throughout 2006. The photographs uploaded to these two groups on Flickr by members of the public will subsequently be included in PictureAustralia.

Brett Corrick, marketing director of Yahoo! Australia & NZ, said: “This is an exciting initiative which encourages Australians everywhere to unite in building a valuable resource for future generations. We want people to upload their photographs of Australia – whether they feature a remote part of the bush or the centre of one of our cities – and to persuade their children, friends and families to add their pictures too.”

Jan Fullerton, National Library director-general, said the Library actively supports the exploration of new models for collecting digital material: “This partnership with Yahoo! Australia and NZ is the National Library’s first effort to reach out to new online ‘spaces’ to capture a major repository of images of contemporary Australia. The project provides enhanced opportunities for existing and new users to share images and will contribute to the long-term development of PictureAustralia.”